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31 Americans Die as Marine Copter Goes Down in Iraq

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 26 - A Marine helicopter crashed in a desert sandstorm early Wednesday near the Jordanian border, killing all 31 aboard, and 6 other service members died in combat, making for the single deadliest day here for American troops since they invaded the country 22 months ago.

The 37 Americans died as insurgents unleashed a wave of violence across the country, killing at least 13 people and wounding 40, including 11 other Americans. The violence occurred just four days before Iraq is set to hold nationwide elections, which the insurgents are fighting to disrupt.

Guerrillas also attacked a number of Iraqi schools, many of which have been designated as polling places. The mayhem seemed intended to scare Iraqis into staying away from the polls.

The helicopter, a CH-53E Super Stallion, went down about 1:20 a.m. near Rutba, a town in western Iraq about 70 miles from the Jordanian border. The area is sparsely populated.

The Marines said the helicopter had been in Anbar Province to conduct "security and stability operations," a phrase officers often use when announcing the deaths of marines in combat.

Officials said that 30 of the dead were marines and that one was a sailor.

The marines were being ferried as part of an effort to provide security for Sunday's elections.

Of the six other American service members who died Wednesday, four were marines killed in Anbar while conducting military operations; one was an Army soldier killed when his patrol was attacked by insurgents firing a rocket-propelled grenade in the town of Duluiya; and the last was a soldier who died in a roadside bombing in Baghdad. Two others were wounded in that attack.

The deaths pushed the total of Americans killed in Iraq to more than 1,400.

In a statement released after the helicopter crash, Lt. Gen. John Sattler, the top Marine commander in Iraq, said a team was at the crash site trying to determine what had gone wrong.

"We will honor their sacrifice by continuing our mission to bring democracy to the people of Iraq," General Sattler said of the dead.

The crash was the first such incident involving a large number of casualties since November 2003, when the downing of three helicopters led to the deaths of 33 American soldiers. In the first, a Chinook helicopter was shot down near Falluja by an insurgent firing an antiaircraft missile, killing 16 soldiers and wounding 26. Later that month, two Black Hawk helicopters that were trying to avoid ground fire collided in the air above Mosul, killing 17 soldiers.

After those incidents, American commanders ordered pilots to fly evasively at all times. American helicopters routinely fly at tree-top level, bobbing and weaving on their way to their destination. Like the Super Stallion that went down Wednesday, Army and Marine helicopters often fly at night, when the threat of attack is diminished. Helicopter pilots say that they are still routinely shot at from the ground but that the tactics have largely prevented the insurgents from hitting them.

Because the helicopters fly so low, one of the principal dangers is electrical and telephone wires, which the choppers often leap over in flight.

The CH-53E Super Stallion involved in the crash is the largest and heaviest helicopter used by the American military.

"Look at its sheer size -- it's huge," said Richard Aboulafia, a military industry analyst at the Teal Group, a northern Virginia aerospace and consulting firm. "It's a monster, and with size comes the fact that it is not very maneuverable."

Weather, too, presents special problems.

"Helicopters are fairly fragile pieces of equipment," said Ivan Oelrich, director of the Strategic Security Project at the Federation of American Scientists, a Washington nonprofit group. "It's rough for them to operate in a dusty, desert environment where the dust can get into the machinery. And they are vulnerable to ground fire because they fly at slow speeds, close to the ground."

In the rest of Iraq, the violent campaign to disrupt the elections continued, even as Iraqi and American officials vowed to hold the elections anyway. In separate attacks, insurgents struck the offices of the country's two main Kurdish political parties. In Sinjar in northern Iraq, a suicide bomber attacked the office of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, killing 5 and wounding 20, according to The Associated Press.

In Baquba, gunmen opened fire on the local headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, killing a police officer, The A.P. reported. Five more Iraqis were killed in the town of Riyadh, north of Baghdad, when insurgents detonated three car bombs, the agency said.

Seven American soldiers were wounded in two separate car bomb attacks on the access road to Baghdad International Airport, one of the most violent routes in the country. Four Americans were wounded in a car bomb attack in Tikrit, officials said.

With the elections four days away, the top American commander in Iraq said the Iraqi security forces were not ready to take the lead role in the military campaign against the insurgents.

"Can I sit here and look you in the eye and say that the Iraqi security forces, guaranteed 100 percent, are going to be able to defeat this insurgency themselves?" said the commander, Gen. George W. Casey Jr. "Of course not."

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At the same time, General Casey said the American military commitment in Iraq could not extend indefinitely, thus making the formation of a competent Iraqi army the foremost goal of American strategy here.

"We cannot stay here forever in the numbers that we are here now; I firmly believe that," the general said. "The Iraqis have to take ownership of this."

In an interview with The Financial Times published Wednesday, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain said the British and United States governments planned to create a "time line" for beginning the process of handing over swaths of Iraq to domestic Iraqi security forces after Sunday's election, a move that is meant to bolster the new government and begin a conversation about when foreign troops will leave the country.

"There are areas where we would be able to hand over to those Iraqi forces." Mr. Blair said. "Remember, 14 out of 18 provinces in Iraq are relatively peaceful and stable."

But he emphasized that there would be no deadline for the withdrawal of troops since much depended on the Iraqi security forces' readiness to battle the prolonged insurgency.

"Both ourselves and the Iraqis want us to leave as soon as possible," Mr. Blair said. "The question is what is as soon as possible? And the answer to that is: when the Iraqi forces have the capability to do the job."

General Casey, in his comments on Wednesday, said the training of the Iraqi forces, who now number about 130,000, was proceeding apace. Where in June there was one competent Iraqi battalion, now there are 40 battalions, each with 400 to 600 soldiers.

He acknowledged the recent failures of the Iraqi security services in Mosul, where some 4,000 police officers left their jobs in November when attacked by insurgents, but said he could see the day when the Iraqis could take over.

"I believe that we can achieve Iraqi security forces over a period of time that can deal with the Iraqi insurgency," he said.

General Casey's assessment was not entirely upbeat, however. He said that the insurgency had grown more organized in the last seven months, and that guerrillas had become more skilled at frightening Iraqis from taking part in the American-led political process.

He refused to estimate the number of insurgents operating in Iraq. But he estimated that American forces had killed or captured 15,000 insurgents in the last year -- a number higher than that given out by American generals last year for the size of the entire insurgency. Foreign fighters, he said, probably numbered fewer than 1,000.

Before Wednesday's crash, the CH-53E Super Stallion had a strong safety record, something analysts said was due to the maturity of its design and the reliability of its equipment.

The helicopter first came into service in 1981, although it is based on a design that dates to the Vietnam War. Produced by the Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation, the helicopter was bought almost exclusively by the Marine Corps. Production ended about five years ago.

A three-engine craft, the helicopter is designed to operate in bad weather, day and night. It can lift more, carry it farther and fly faster than other helicopters in the Pentagon's fleet. Equipped with night vision ability, it is designed to operate in harsh terrain.

"This is a craft that can operate day or night, in all types of weather," said John Milliman, a spokesman for the Naval Air Systems Command at Patuxent River, Md. "It is a very big, very rugged helicopter than can carry a very heavy load."

Still, for all its bulk, the craft remains vulnerable. If forced to fly evasively in bad weather, a pilot could become disoriented.

Some American officials have expressed worry that the harsh conditions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the frequency with which the helicopters are deployed, could have rendered them vulnerable.

At an October 2003 hearing of the House Armed Services Committee, Representative Joel R. Hefley, Republican of Colorado, the chairman, said the typical Super Stallion returning from service in Afghanistan and Iraq was found to have 150 pounds of sand spread throughout its interior.

Sand is thought to be one of the worst enemies of the helicopter in Iraq, wearing down rotors and seeping into engines and electronics. It can blind pilots, especially on landing, when the helicopters kick up huge clouds of dust. It mixes with lubricants and turns them into sticky masses of gum.

"The conditions were harsh," Mr. Hefley said. "The heat, the sand, the operational tempo together resulted in our troops taking a beating."

Reporting for this article was contributed by Leslie Wayne in New York, Thom Shanker at Camp Victory in Iraq, Eric Schmitt in Washington, and Lizette Alvarez in London.

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A version of this article appears in print on January 27, 2005, on Page A00001 of the National edition with the headline: THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ: CASUALTIES; 31 AMERICANS DIE AS MARINE COPTER GOES DOWN IN IRAQ. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe